defrag not cleaning as expected

I'm running the Defraggler Pro v2.22.995 on my laptop. I have one drive (698GB TOSHIBA MQ01ABD075 (SATA )) which has two partitions.

  1. "C" partition 242GB, this is the boot partition
  2. "E" partition 453GB, this is my data partition

I've run Defraggler twice and have not reduced the fragmentation lower than 21% on the C partition (see the attached image). A fragmentation level of 21% seems excessive. The E partition shows zero fragmentation. The C partition shows 174 Fragmented files (10.9 GB). The current number of fragmented files is 174 which is MUCH lower than what I originally had (sorry I did not capture an image) but I expected it to be much closer to zero. Possibly I'm just confused, Do you have a dummies version of what I should know about this?

Defraggler different values for fragmentation 2018 0730.png

OK I just ran the windows analyze function in Win10 as well as the analyze in Defraggler. Win10 reports that the drive is 3% fragmented and Defraggler reports that it is 23% fragmented, see the image. Obviously one of them is wrong.

How much fragmentation 2018 0801.png

Neither is wrong, defraggler results contain results windows defragger ignores. You are trying to reach a zero or near zero defrag status. This is relatively impossible to achieve. The 23% that defraggler sees is a very good defrag minimum.

in DF, make sure Stop VSS, Exclude Restore Points and Exclude hibernation file is ticked.

mta -

  • For the restore points, are you referring to the folder at "C:\Windows\System32\restore"? I did look an currently the only thing in this folder is one small text file. I assume that because this is a new PC I have no restore points. I will be setting this up in the near future.
  • For VSS I opened the Options > Advanced and checked "Stop VSS when defragmenting NTFS volume". I just read some of the FAQ and one does address stopping VSS, it seems that this should be the default.
  • For the hibernation file, I added "C:\hiberfil.sys" to the exclude list

Nergal - Previously I had read that you should not have more than 5% fragmentation thus I was concerned that DF was reporting 23%.